O Rose Thou Art Sick

The moment I released a new lyric video for the song “Trying To Make A Meal” last month, I was struck down with a parade of chills and aches. My body celebrated this video release by merging unbearable heat with arctic cold to create a physiological festival of discomfort. The opening act: the feeling of my muscles crumbling in on themselves. The headliner: projectile phlegm. The afterparty: self-loathing. But now that the post-festival clean-up is all done, there’s a euphoria in getting back to routines. There’s also a strong desire not to dwell on the whole thing, because that’s, well, a little gauche.

But why do we tend to deal with illness in such hushed tones? I am with Virginia Woolf: in On Being Ill, she writes that the experience of sickness “cannot be imparted,” and explains how “suffering serves but to wake memories in his friends' minds of their influenzas, their aches and pains which went unwept last February, and now cry out, desperately, clamorously, for the divine relief of sympathy. But sympathy we cannot have.”

Oh, the pain of not being seen in one’s pain! Feeling ill can be like feeling grief, in that we isolate ourselves in a fabricated belief that nobody is really empathizing with us enough. As W.H. Auden puts it in “Funeral Blues”: “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone / Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone.” We’re really going to go so deep into our own feelings that we won’t let the dog snack? Such is our selfishness in pain, illness, and isolation. You don’t know the state I’m in, and ooh baby I’m revelling in it.

It’s not that we don’t care about each other’s maladies. But like Woolf articulates, we can only list our symptoms so many times before even our most patient friends’ minds start to wander. Perhaps we can’t dwell on illness too long, because illness is a hop skip & jump away from death, and that is simply not on the grocery list today.

It doesn’t help that coming down with the average virus doesn’t make for a great story. “I was going to go to the concert, but I’m going to watch Parks & Rec bloopers on the couch instead.” The ultimate cruelty is that the sick lack the energy to spin these frail threads into a compelling yarn. Even though illness often fits the classic, Campbellian hero’s journey—departure, initiation, return—we don’t have the energy to whip it into myth when we’re struggling to claw open a sachet of NeoCitran.

Perhaps it’s most important to use our time in illness not to express how we’re feeling, but to observe, to take in the world as it really is. I just finished underrated Ontarian author Joan Barfoot’s novel Abra, whose protagonist proposes that yearly sickness is important “because for all the pain and discomfort, it is important at times to see things too clearly, to hear things too strongly, to feel things too harshly. Surely that must be why.”

All I know for sure right now is that post-sickness euphoria is real, and I’ve been thrilled to get out into the world again. See you out and about!

Love & healthy kisses muah muah muah,

Sam

◠ The new lyric video for the song “Trying to Make a Meal” is out now! It’s from In Season, which you can buy via Bandcamp.

For Nova Scotian readers: the provincial government has proposed a budget that guts arts and culture funding by over 30%. It’s a fiscally irresponsible, shortsighted, and cruel notion. Life without art is rote languishing. Learn more and write to your MLA here: http://www.nsarts.ca/emailyourmla.html.

ALBUM: I’m lifting weights for the first time in my life and Kneecap is making it easier.

VIDEO: Speaking of Kneecap, this documentary on Irish language revival by Channel 5 is inspiring.

OBJECT: I may have to do a whole newsletter someday about Tuffy, the resident CBC “Metro Morning” cat circa the 1980s. The mug below, featuring Tuffy, was my parents’, and it’s served me well as an adorable desktop pencil holder.

While bringing pets to work isn’t as popular these days (folks have allergies, etc.), a cat in a work environment can diffuse the tension of a busy workplace, and I love imagining CBC’s Tuffy strutting around a busy newsroom, reminding people that things aren’t as dire as they may seem. It’s also a great look to associate the CBC with such a sweet mascot. The station’s cat enjoyed snuggling up with “Metro Morning” host Joe Cote and even had his own ID badge (see photo below…warning: very cute). It reminds me of that cat who was a railway station master in Japan and damn if that’s not adorable I don’t know what is.

BOOK: Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto by Tricia Hersey.

PERSON: you!